I went for The Prestige, but Inception is a close second, Dark Knight probably third. I haven’t seen his first film, (The?) Following. The Prestige really is one of those films that improves with multiple viewings, and it is very good on the first one!
Here is my ranking of the ones I’ve seen:
- Inception <–possibly in the top 10 of all time for me
- The Dark Knight
- Batman Begins
- The Prestige
- The Dark Knight Rises
- Memento
- Interstellar ← Bit of a misfire
- Dunkirk <–I did not enjoy this. It’s right up my alley, too.
- Tenet <–a bad movie despite a ton of effort he put in. I kind of hated it
I haven’t seen them all (Interstellar, Dunkirk, Tenet, and Following)
I think Memento, The Prestige, and Inception are really quite wonderful. I went with Memento because I found its hook a little more engaging than The Prestige or Inception. But it’s close.
I’ve only seen 5 of them. Out of those 5 I put Prestige up top. I have no reason to not see the others I just haven’t.
Arise, old thread! Mainly because I watched an abbreviated version of The Dark Knight tonight, mainly my favorite scenes
A long time ago, I would have said the Batman movies, then Memento, then maybe Prestige or maybe Interstellar. I didn’t like Inception’s ending and it did ruin the whole thing for me.
However.
Nolan is gimmicky, like M. Night, and his movies don’t hold up to many viewings. Looking back, he ruined Batman because his Batman isn’t the greatest detective, he’s an action hero who figured a few things out due to his money. I think he leaned too far into realism with it and that’s not what I wanted to see.
Memento doesn’t hold up when watched in order. Yes, the genius is in the edit but I’m talking about multiple viewings. It turns out I’m cheering a killer who needs help instead of a man trapped in his memories.
The Prestige was another ruined by a reveal. A cloning tank? I hated that. At least the other trick was good stage magic.
Interstellar is this philosophical mess of a movie. I think it was here on these boards that someone said that the technology that the farming equipment represented was enough to save humanity. How does moving them to a planet without enough food to take allow them to start over in time to stop famine?? It makes no sense.
Ugh, this is more of a rant than I intended. I like scenes of the Batman movies and ideas that he has but I lost interest in Nolan’s stuff a long time ago.
That pretty well sums up my opinion of Nolan, also.
In Interstellar they have the tech to travel to other stars, but can’t do anything about Earth?
- Dunkirk
- The Prestige.
- Oppenheimer
It’s close though, on a different day I might swap Dunkirk and The Prestige
Interstellar is meh, good in places but a lot of rubbish, he could have cut a third of it (most of the scenes on the earth) and it would have made a better movie.
I went with Memento because I found its hook a little more engaging than The Prestige or Inception. But it’s close.
A really creative “hook”.
As someone with memory and ADD issues, Memento is a constant reminder to Write Things Down (“Quick, before I forget it in a few minutes, I’ve got to put it in on my phone with an alarm… then when that goes off I’ll think 'Whazzat? Who put an alarm on my phone? Ahhh, ‘twas me!’ Thank you, younger me!”)
Inception (unlike the Prestige) is a good but not great sci-fi film. It’s well done and raises some interesting ideas but it doesn’t come close to the really great films in that “what is reality” genre of sci-fi. Hell, I’ve spent longer thinking whether the end of Total Recall, which is far from the most celebral film in the genre, is actually reality (it’s not 
) than wondering the same thing about the end of Inception.
That’s a good point! I don’t like endings like Inception because we are dealing with specific, concrete things, and then the discussion of it all is philosophical and ignores that the technology has limits but would work the way they needed it to work or not.
On Total Recall, I agree that it’s not reality because the ending is too clean. As a paid for action adventure memory insert? It’s perfect!
I’ve been thinking about how to do a good Batman and what would work for me. Later movies have made him strong but I see him as agile and avoiding hits, and fights, more than getting into them. He knows the long term effects of damage on the body and uses his gadgets to take down foes so he doesn’t risk injury. There are good scenes of him scaring people as he appears, takes a thug out, and disappears. I like the Arkham Asylum version where if he’s seen, it’s back to a save game. He has to be silent and strike from the shadows.
I still see him as the World’s Greatest Detective, which means Sherlock Holmes. I think Elementary did the best version of Sherlock I have seen and it could be applied to Batman. There are seven steps to a crime and Batman gets to all of them. Then others around him can see up to certain levels but he still sees them all. It raises them up but still gives Batman the edge. Again, Nolan made him more of an action hero. I think that might be baggage from being a comic book character?
This is my problem with Interstellar. As The Martian points out, we grow things here on earth because the plants, soil, and humans, grew up in the same environment. You can’t take seeds from an earth plant and put it in another soil and it will grow! It would take a while to get what was needed, especially at scale.
Nolan gives us great spectacles to watch but it’s not something that holds up to later thought. I haven’t seen Dunkirk or Oppenheimer, so don’t know how well he did with historical events.
Thanks for the discussion!
What bugged me more than that is even if they worked all that out, the problems on Earth were caused by plant diseases, so traveling into space would not have solved anything, the diseases would have traveled with them into space (and been far worse in a enclosed spaceship).
The ending was crap on many levels but what bugged me about it was I thought they were going to say all ghosts were caused by future astronauts who fell into black holes and got trapped, which would have brought it back a bit for me
Personally, I thought that Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock was a pretty good mix of action and detective work, and what I’d be looking for in a Batman movie.
It’s sort of nonsense for Sherlock Holmes but it was a good Batman movie.
I put Memento, because I think as a whole it is a complete film. Plus, its soundtrack is cranked to 11+.
I haven’t seen all of his movies, but, of the ones I have, I just think they’re OK. I like them, but they’re not The Best.
Your spoiler has a vastly different conclusion than mines.
Those are not cloning tanks. Those are the tanks where one of the versions of himself has drowned in during the trick. He’s kept them all (probably easier to hide the trick than dispose of them). It is left ambiguous whether it is the copy which lives or that is the one who dies, but I take it as that is the original (due to the nature of then transit), so he has in fact killed himself several hundred times and is the 200th odd clone of himself.
I am not sure how “cloning tanks” would fit into an ending there.
My top favorites are probably:
Inception
The Prestige
Dunkirk
Tenet
I know I’m in a bit of a minority ranking Tenet so high. I just thought the way they portrayed time travel was pretty neat and unique.
Had to with The Prestige, followed by Memento.
I apologize. Those tanks don’t do the cloning but the trick is still from cloning, which I didn’t like. Good catch!
I completely agree!
For me Interstellar is number 1 with a bullet. The only serious contender for me is The Dark Knight and that’s more about Heath Ledger’s Joker than it is about Nolan’s Gotham.
You didn’t ask but Tenet is last, and it’s so far below the others it’s basically under 200 feet of steaming sewage. Fuck everything about that movie.
I think I base my rankings most on rewatchablity. Several of you have pointed out valid plot holes in Interstellar, but ultimately I don’t care. Every time I hit play on that movie I’m 100% engrossed and transported into space. Perhaps I have a predisposition to being biased since space movies tend to be one of my favorite genres, starting with Star Wars and 2001 and every piece of crap they spawned.
It’s a bit strange, they’re a lot about that movie that should bump me. McConaughey is an actor I like in small doses, but Nolan managed to dial him back for an entire movie and make me buy in completely. Hathaways’s character has all the potential to be a complete wet blanket as a forced love interest but again, Nolan gives it the perfect light touch and makes her into a full fledged character. The cuts to back to Earth actually have purpose, it’s not just emotional manipulation. And the ending is the perfect kind of hand wavy technobabble. It’s opaque enough that I don’t really bother to scrutinize it but not so nonsensical that I roll my eyes. I know it wouldn’t hold up if I overthought it, but it for some reason doesn’t insist that i get it to appreciate it. I can watch this movie over and over and always have a good time. It’s also the one Nolan movie that has that huge score that tries to bury you in sound but I still don’t spend half the movie trying to parse the dialogue, it’s mixed perfectly.
I enjoyed Memento well enough but I don’t think it’s half as original as some fanboys seem to think it is. Amnesia movies have been around forever and so have stories told in reverse. This one just happened to be the first I know of to combine the two, so I don’t give it extra credit for originality. It’s also a low budget movie which makes the fact that it’s good impressive, but over time the cheapness of it starts to show through. Of course the big twist ending really ruins it rewatchability. I’ve seen this maybe 3 or 4 times and the last couple left me checking my phone halfway through.
I’m not a comic book nerd but I’ve grown up on comic book movies, so Nolans Batman is the definitive version for me. I don’t really care if he diverged from the Batman of the comics since I’m ignorant of it. I just found that world which he created to be the perfect blend of fantastic and realistic. I also loved the way the MCU handled it, but the darker more serious Gotham that Nolan built is far more interesting to rewatch. And it’s tough to know how much of Ledger’s Joker is Nolan and how much is Ledger, but it remains one of the greatest villain performances of all time.
I’ve liked almost all of Nolan’s movies except that one. He gets a lifetime opening weekend subscription from me. Inception is really fun and the visuals are amazing but i find that this movie loses a lot of energy when watched at home. I also felt like the movie might have been better as just a heist movie without the whole dead wife routine. The Prestige is really fun but it probably should have been 30 minutes shorter. Even though the ending is where most of the memorable drama is I find myself getting bored before Borden ends up in jail. Dunkirk is an amazing war move; but there are better war movies. I don’t think I could make that my favorite Nolan movie if it’s not in my top 5 of war movies. Oppenheimer was a memorable experience but only time will tell if it’s a movie I ever return to.
As an aside, is it threadshitting to come into a thread asking what your favorite Nolan movie is only to post that you don’t like Nolan movies?
Not the way you did. I will say that I think Tenet was terrible and Oppenheimer…yeah, I think it was just OK for me now that I look back on it.
I hope he can deliver something great next time.
And I hope his brother’s “Fallout” show will be good when it drops in April. Yes, based on the Fallout video game series.
This.
(Sounds like I should watch “Following.”)